Cool It, Truckers: That Good Buddy in the Chevy May Be CHP

If you want to know how hard it is to spot the new, almost unmarked California Highway Patrol cruisers, ask the man in the red Porsche on the Santa Ana Freeway in Irvine.

The driver, trying to persuade a Chevy to clear the way in the middle lane, rode the Chevy’s rear bumper at 65 m.p.h. for about half a mile, then in frustration swerved around and cut in front of it with seemingly inches to spare.

The Porsche driver didn’t see Highway Patrol Officer Jim Lindquist watching him because the officer was inside the Chevy. The result: one embarrassing ticket for following a Highway Patrol car too closely.

If the Porsche driver had been a little less brash, Lindquist might have ignored him, for Porsches are not the intended prey of these new patrol cars.

They are on the road in Orange County and other locales statewide to catch “cowboy” truckers, the drivers of the big rigs who speed, bully other drivers and cause increasingly more frequent accidents.

Able to talk to one another with citizens’ band radios and able to see great distances from their high driver seats, these truckers have become very difficult to catch, officers say.

In Orange County, such truckers caused 132 accidents in 1985 on the Santa Ana Freeway between Brookhurst Street in Anaheim and Jeffrey Road in Irvine, according to CHP statistics.

Those figures qualified that stretch of highway for one of the 15 “special enforcement vehicles” that began patrolling in California on Jan. 12.

Lindquist, serving his third shift in the car assigned to the CHP’s Santa Ana office, said it takes a while to get used to the new cruisers. Their near invisibility cuts two ways.

“The biggest difference is going through traffic,” Lindquist said. “People aren’t yielding so much. You have to be careful when you’re pulling someone over and make sure you’re visible.

“That was part of the training--that you’re not out there in a big black-and-white with lights on top. People aren’t necessarily going to move out of your way and make room for you.”

Common-Looking Cars

The new cars do not have the distinctive profile of the standard, black-and-white Highway Patrol car with its reinforced front bumper, its side-mounted spotlights, its big warning lights on the roof or rear seat deck and its shotgun mounted upright against the dash board. The black-and-whites also have “HIGHWAY PATROL” printed on the trunk lid and doors.

The special cars are smaller, a mixture of Chevrolet Celebrities, Ford Mustangs and Dodge Diplomats painted various neutral colors common on the road. Lindquist’s Chevrolet is entirely white.

These smaller cars have warning lights facing rearward, but they are small and are mounted unobtrusively on the rear seat deck. So unobtrusively that one Santa Ana officer reported being tailgated by a big rig so closely that “all you could see in the rear view mirror was ‘Kenworth.’ ”

The side-mounted spotlights remain, but they are smaller, painted the same color as the car and from a distance appear to be rear-view mirrors. The shotgun is mounted out of sight between the rear seats.

The radio antennas are smaller and hardly noticeable, considering all the similar car-phone antennas seen on the road. A citizens’ band radio receiver has been added so officers can hear what the truckers are saying.

The only markings identifying the cars as Highway Patrol cruisers are on the doors, which are painted white and have a smaller-than-usual Highway Patrol decal applied.

‘Dropping Anchor’

That, said Lindquist, is a concession to the Highway Patrol’s concern that an entirely unmarked car might encourage people to pose as officers. “Strange people could get into that real easily,” he said.

So far, the markings on the door are hardly noticed by truckers or car drivers, according to Lindquist. When they are, he said, you witness the “dropping anchor” phenomenon--a driver roaring up beside the car, then suddenly falling back as if pulled from behind.

So far, most drivers, including the usually watchful truckers, simply have not noticed, Lindquist said.

Lindquist and the four other Santa Ana officers trained to use the car have been instructed to concentrate on “commercial vehicle” violations as much as possible, specifically the long-haul tractor-trailer rigs, said Lt. Mike Howard, field operations officer in Santa Ana.

They will, however, cite other motorists when the violation is significant, and they will assist at accident scenes, Howard said.

Under legislation sponsored by state Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), the cars are being deployed statewide for a one-year test in areas where truck-at-fault accidents have been greatest, said Lt. Mark Schock at CHP headquarters in Sacramento.

Truck accident statistics for that year will be compared to those of previous years to determine whether the program shows promise.

5 Test Locations

“The idea is accident reduction, not more tickets,” Lindquist said. “If we don’t reduce the accidents, what’s the point?”

The CHP has selected five test locations, Schock said. Besides the Orange County stretch of Interstate 5, the special cars are patrolling:

- The Long Beach Freeway between Anaheim Boulevard and the Artesia Freeway, which has the highest truck-at-fault accident rate in the state--18.2 per mile of freeway in 1985. “That’s a nightmare,” Schock said.

- Interstate 5 between Verdugo Hills and the Bakersfield turnoff.

- State 99 between Merced and Modesto.

- State 880 through Oakland and Hayward.

“We were wondering how these cars would work in the dense urban traffic,” Schock said. “We thought they would work better on the open road.

“So far it seems to be exactly the opposite. Our officers are reporting that within 15 minutes of getting on the roadway at Modesto, they are being put on the air (over truckers’ citizens’ band radios).”

Still, during the first four days of the program, officers were issuing an average of 4.6 tickets to truckers per shift, “and I think that’s darned good,” Schock said. “That’s great, in fact,” considering how normally difficult it is to catch speeding truckers, he said.

Lindquist said he is not sure what renegade truckers will do to counter the new cars. He said it will be difficult for them to watch for the new cars, since they are so similar to civilian cars and since the different models will be rotated among locales.

“I feel it’s going to be effective,” Lindquist said. “We’ll keep them guessing, and they’ll decide it’s easier just to keep the speed down.

“There’ll always be the ‘cowboys’ out there, however, and those are the ones we’re after.”